Here at Stephens & Stephens, LLP, we are continually studying the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act (EEOICPA), from every angle, in order to understand all facets of the Act. This includes not only the Act itself, but the entire process of Atomic Weapons Employment that produced the somewhat less than ideal working conditions that led to the Act’s passage in the first place.
To that end, we have recently completed a complete Facility List of all 382 sites currently covered by the Act, with links to individual pages that describe each site’s location, activities, type (Atomic Weapons Employer [AWE], Department of Energy [DOE], Beryllium Employer [BE], etc.), EEOICP claims statistics, and time frames when the sites were active. As is the nature of the beast, these pages can be variously either incredibly detailed or somewhat vague, depending on currently available open sources of information.We have also provided a List and relevant pages for work sites that fall under the Special Exposure Cohort (SEC) provision of the Act.
The site descriptions, however, can constitute a ponderous collection of details that would require even the most devoted student of the realm to spend copious amounts of time learning everything from nuclear physics to geography to territorial rights in order to fully comprehend, all of which likely involves more time and patience than most possess.
However, the Nuclear Age we live in was maturing in tandem with the Video Age we are now also fully immersed in at literally every turn. Further, we have entered a time when vast amounts of formerly classified information concerning the Manhattan Engineering District (or MED, which created the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the subsequent Cold War are becoming freely available.
Therefore, it seemed only both reasonable and logical to include all available video documentation to our growing Library of data concerning the EEOICPA. The videos cover everything from the construction (and occasional demolition) of various sites to detailed documentation of nuclear bomb testing in Alaska, the Pacific Ocean, and Nevada to eminent physicist Richard Feynman’s highly amusing recollections of working with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other videos can serve to simplify complex nuclear science into language and images that make them understandable without becoming mired in minutiae. Still others document interviews with former Workers and their struggles with both certain Facilities and the Act.
In keeping with our fundamental aim of keeping as much information as possible both freely accessible and easily available, we have embedded the videos on their respective pages and linked to all of them on our Video Page, extended to complement Hugh’s concise explanation of the Act itself.
Please visit our collection of EEOICPA Site Videos for a fascinating view into the inner workings of nuclear annihilation.